Word: shostakoviches
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although the 15 symphonies are his best-known works, it is likely that a truer portrait of the composer is to be found in the quartets. After Shostakovich's daring opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was denounced in the pages of Pravda as "muddle instead of music," he apologized with the Fifth Symphony (1937), a "creative reply to just criticism." Censured by a Communist Party resolution of 1948 for "formalistic distortions and antidemocratic tendencies," Shostakovich wrote two of his next three symphonies about the Russian Revolution. But these works were for official consumption; spiritually, Shostakovich went underground to express...
...Shostakovich's quartets reveal his more intimate side...
When Dmitri Shostakovich died in 1975, his music was dismissed by many in the West as hopelessly oldfashioned. With his unabashed melodies and basically conservative harmonies, the Soviet composer was a misfit in an age that prized innovation above all, and he was often unfavorably compared with his more radical contemporaries Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Who would have predicted, then, that a cycle of Shostakovich's 15 string quartets by Britain's Fitzwilliam Quartet would turn out to be the instrumental highlight of the New York season...
...decline of the serialist school, which had rigidly dominated composition since the end of World War II, has opened the way once again for a more humanistic, accessible form of musical expression. Shostakovich's pensive, sardonic, sometimes anguished style no longer has to be considered a liability. In fact, as reflected in the Fitzwilliam's excellent, probing performances-which concluded last week in Alice Tully Hall-his directness is one of his great strengths. For the conventional view of Shostakovich as merely a bombastic reactionary is wrong: he had something to say, and he said...
...repertory, like the Berlioz Requiem. He first came to attention when he organized an uncut performance of Berlioz's sprawling opera Les Troyens at Carnegie Hall in 1972 and then conducted the work the following year at the Met. An imaginative programmer, he has championed offbeat works like Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15, the composer's enigmatic symphonic valedictory...